Looking back at looking back at Wilde

Thursday marked the 160th birthday of Oscar Wilde. To celebrate, TNR republished a classic essay from their archives by George Woodcock, who pondered the writer’s enduring appeal:

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A century after his birth, and more than half a century after his death, Wilde continues to enjoy a reputation that can hardly be justified by his mere literary achievement. For, if we consider his works at all seriously, it soon becomes evident that few of them can bear comparison with the best work of other writers in his time. The Importance of Being Earnest and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, some of the fairy stories and perhaps Salomé, parts of Intentions and The Soul of Man under Socialism—these are doubtless enough to ensure permanence as minor English classic, but they can hardly justify the reputation Wilde retains or the controversy that centers around him. It is evidently something more than his books alone that makes it impossible to think of the ‘nineties without Wilde or to write the literary history of the past century without paying tribute to his influence.

Wilde’s legend, indeed, owes its longevity partly to the dramatic memory of his fall from popular fame in 1895 and his subsequent death in exile, and this memory has been sustained by the controversy over his personality that had continued almost unabated over the fifty-four years since his death (as recently as 1952, St. John Ervine could write a study of Wilde that was distorted by a bitter attack on his homosexuality and his Irish nationality.) But other writers have been imprisoned, or have been known homosexuals, without drawing the kind of attention that has been focused for so many years upon Wilde. And we must see him as something more than the sensational victim of Victorian mores if we are to explain the way in which interests and controversy have continued to center around his name.

Perhaps we can only explain this phenomenon fully (a) by considering Wilde’s actual works and seeing what induces people to read them despite their imperfections and (b) by analyzing the impression Wilde made upon his contemporaries. The second point should perhaps be considered first, since the fact that Wilde’s trial and condemnation created such a lasting sensation arose largely from the attitude which people had already adopted towards him.

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